I can clearly remember the excitement of watching Don Cupitt in his BBC series, entitled 'The Sea of Faith'. It was 1984, and I was a curate in a Kent parish of the C of E. By that time, I'd done a reasonable amount of hospital visiting as well as visiting plenty of families on a large housing estate. I felt I was in touch with what a segment of working people thought about Christianity. So when Don Cupitt said the supernatural beliefs of Christianity were no longer believed in by the bulk of the UK population, it struck chords. What he said was so true to my practical experience. He spoke in a way that bishops and church leaders didn't: searingly truthful and no pretending that everything was fine in the world of Christian belief. The tide of faith was going out. Forty years on, for his honesty, Don Cupitt was pilloried as 'an atheist priest'. He received no preferment in the church, and ambitious clergy steered clear of him, for fear that affiliation with his views might damage their careers. And yet so many of the questions he raised in the tv series and in his books remain unanswered, unconsidered, and ignored in the forty years that have passed. We're not big thinkers in the Church of England, and we don't like to be challenged.
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